Richard Evan Schwartz (born August 11, 1966) is an American mathematician notable for his contributions to geometric group theory and to an area of mathematics known as billiards.
He has explored geometric iterations involving polygons,[2] and he has been credited for developing the mathematical concept known as the pentagram map.
[6] He has collaborated with mathematicians Valentin Ovsienko[7] and Sergei Tabachnikov[8] to show that the pentagram map is "completely integrable.
[9] He played an April Fool's joke on fellow mathematics professors at Brown University by sending an email suggesting that students could be admitted randomly, along with references to bogus studies which purportedly suggested that there were benefits to having a certain population of the student body selected at random; the story was reported in the Brown Daily Herald.
"[13] Mathematician Keith Devlin, on NPR, agreed, saying that Schwartz "very skillfully and subtly embeds mathematical ideas into the drawings."